[HeyLaughingBoy]

I could do this in my basement!

Years ago I answered a "for sale" newspaper ad for used office desks and some test equipment. I showed up at the address and it was a small dingy old building and most of the employees seemed to be 55+ year-old women. When I asked what they did and was told they made diodes, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Like he did, I assumed that all electronics parts manufacturing was high-tech, cleanroom work, etc. But here were little old ladies putting pieces together.

I had a similar epiphany years later when a friend told me he was buying a thermocouple manufacturing business for $20,000!!! The business consisted of two senior citizens who wanted to retire. No high-speed pick&place robots working in inert argon atmospheres, just two old people putting wire in jigs and spot-welding them together (probably in an inert atmosphere, though).

The same thing repeats itself over and over: a huge amount of what we think of as sophisticated technology is being done by hand, or by ancient machinery, in dirty, poorly lit corners of the US.

[DanBC]

I ised to work in electronic subcontract engineering. They had some automation (little pick and place machine with oven and screen printer; a flow oven for populated PCBs) but there was a lot of work done by hand.

It was a terrible time of my life and it informs a lot of my opinion about poor management and inefficient working and about ISO900x quality assurance systems.

[madengr]

ISO9000 just means you must document that management crap on it's employees. As long as your crappy processes are documented, you are good-to-go.

[ttflee]

Passing these management craps are not completely meaningless. Sometimes, people do realise what was the problem during the process of producing these management craps.

[noselasd]

Making transistors at home from silicon wafers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM

[tzs]

Different video from her that gives a nice overview, and uses some different methods: http://hackaday.com/2010/05/13/transistor-fabrication-so-sim...

[marcosdumay]

Clean rooms are very old technology, they are made at least since photography exists. And, of course, you only need them if the features you want to press are very small (and a better one the smaller feature size), big components can go without.

I wouldn't make leds at home, but that's because of the chemistry, not because it can't be done...

[jotm]

This is why we need more posts like these and more of those How things are made blogs. Too often people don't even begin getting into (high) tech because they think it's too complicated or expensive.

[205guy]

Anyone else have the theme from Bladerunner playing in their head?